I think I fell in love with marketing because, to me, it always felt creative long before it ever felt technical.

Long before I worked in branding, PR, or marketing strategy, I was just a creative person trying to figure out how to get people to see what I was making. My OG dream was to become a professional costume designer and content creator, and very early on I realized that if I wanted to build something meaningful, I had to learn how to market myself.

I definitely did not have everything figured out, but what I did have was an incredible community of people willing to believe in my ideas. People who shared my content, helped me execute creative projects, exchanged knowledge with me, and were willing to experiment alongside me as I learned more about branding, storytelling, and marketing.

I quit my full-time jobs three different times trying to go “full-time” before I had ever really made a profitable penny doing it. Which, looking back, was either deeply ambitious or slightly insane. Probably both.

But that experience forced me to learn everything. Marketing. Branding. Content. Community building. Finance. Business management. Storytelling. It really was a one-woman show for a long time.

And somewhere in the middle of all of that, I fell madly in love with marketing.

What started as a tool to support my creative work eventually became a creative discipline of its own. Marketing became the art I was most drawn to - a form of creativity rooted in narrative, perception, emotion, and human connection. It became something I could share with people in a way that even the costumes I designed could not fully fulfill.

But it was during my time at Misty Mountain Gaming - through the brands, campaigns, products, and creative work we produced there - that I really began to intentionally practice and refine that philosophy.

That environment became the battleground where I watched traditional marketing and more artful, culturally driven marketing collide and create something genuinely powerful. It was also where I realized that both things can, and should, exist together.

Structure matters in marketing. Technical skill matters. Strategy, SEO, analytics, media buying, digital advertising - these things are incredibly important, and I never want to discredit the expertise required to execute them well.

But I also think the industry has become disproportionately technical.

Outside of traditionally creative spaces, marketing has increasingly been treated as a system to optimize rather than a living form of communication. And while optimization absolutely has its place, I think something gets lost when marketing becomes purely mechanical.

Too much structure in marketing can whitewash culture. It can flatten emotion. It can turn living, breathing brands into optimized content machines with no real perspective, tension, humanity, or point of view.

Even the most creative influencers or artists cannot fully create resonance for brands that lack cultural depth themselves. Creative output is always shaped, in some way, by the identity of the thing it represents.

Art and culture have always belonged together for a reason. Culture moves people long before data explains why.

And I believe marketing as an art form belongs everywhere - from deeply creative and local brands all the way to enterprise organizations and highly technical industries. Human beings are still human beings at the end of the day. Emotion, perception, trust, narrative, and meaning influence every market. The rise of the influencer industry is all the evidence we need of that.

As I continue reflecting on my career so far, everything I have learned keeps reinforcing this philosophy for me - not just around marketing, but around business as a whole. Honestly, I use the terms marketing and business interchangeably sometimes because, to me, marketing is not just one department within a business. It is the psychology of the business itself.

Marketing is vast. Like art forms, there are so many different canvases for it.

A business does not exist without marketing. Even the smallest corner shop with no social media presence still relies on word of mouth, reputation, perception, community, trust, and human connection. That is marketing.

Marketing exists in every interaction, every feeling, every story people tell about a brand when the business itself is not in the room.

That is why I believe marketing belongs everywhere. That belief deeply informs what I hope Jupiter House will become. Marissa and I care deeply about narrative because narrative is everything. But more importantly, we care about genuine narrative.

Every brand is telling a story whether they are aware of it or not. Every founder is shaping perception. Every campaign is creating emotional context around a business. But the strongest narratives are not manufactured out of thin air - they are discovered, refined, amplified, and communicated through the real culture that already exists within a business.

It starts with the relationship employees, leadership, and communities have with the business itself. It starts with the values people carry into the work, the way a company makes people feel, the stories being told internally long before they are ever communicated externally.

That is where narrative begins. Narrative is woven into culture.

I do not believe marketing teams should come into a business and completely wash out its identity just because they were hired to “rebrand” or modernize it. Marketing should not erase identity from a business. It should help uncover and articulate the identity that is already there.

That is where thoughtful brand strategy, communications, and PR become so important. Not as tools for manufacturing perception disconnected from reality, but as ways of translating a company’s existing identity, values, and emotional truth into something people can genuinely connect with.

The question is never just: “What are we selling?”

The real question is: “What are people feeling when they encounter us?”

Marketing, to me, is not about forcing attention. It is about creating resonance. It’s about understanding aesthetics, psychology, timing, symbolism, identity, desire, tension, aspiration, and emotional memory. It’s about understanding people beyond demographics and seeing culture as something alive.

That perspective also changes the way I think about work itself.

Do I have to wake up every day and “do marketing for brands”?

Or do I get to spend my life using creativity, narrative, and perspective to help people move ideas forward?

To help businesses become more culturally alive? More emotionally intelligent? More human?

That is infinitely more interesting to me.

I think society is already moving in this direction. Audiences are becoming more perceptive - hello, Gen Alpha. People are craving meaning, personality, texture, taste, perspective, and honesty. Realness.

The brands that will matter most are not the ones shouting the loudest. They are the ones creating worlds people actually want to belong to.

That is the kind of work Jupiter House hopes to make by approaching marketing as both an art and a discipline.